The information revolution has seen an increase both in the frequency at which new information is generated and in its volume. New findings and developments in science, technology, finance and law require people to keep up to date so as not to lag behind the competition.
Keeping up to date requires first finding all the relevant resources, and then scanning them periodically. Feed readers have emerged as one of the prominent web 2.0 applications. A feed reader, also known as RSS reader or feed aggregator, is usually based on RSS or Atom standards. RSS is a family of formats including Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0), and Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0).
Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.” Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being “pulled” to the subscriber, as opposed to “pushed” with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some “pushed” information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.
However, as feeds keep streaming new posts, and as new feeds appear, the task of going over all posts in one's feed reader becomes overwhelming. The difficulty is twofold: for one, the sheer amount of posts may be very large; but on top of that, the quality of posts is not unified, and thus one is first faced with the task of filtering, and then with the task of actually reading. An individual can only read a limited amount of information.
The same problem can be observed in a group of people who are working together. Each of the group members faces the problem individually. But also, as a group, the members want to keep up to date on current developments. In a group, this does not mean that each member has to read all items of relevance. It is enough that only the relevant members of the group keep-up-date on the items most relevant to them in a way that supports the operation of the entire group.
There are many existing feed readers. One example is Google Reader (Google is a trade mark of Google, Inc.). Google Reader has a public page in which a user can expose his feeds which can be provided as a feed to other users. Personal feed collections allow users to peek into other users' feeds (e.g., in the case of following a mentor and getting to know a new field by the feeds already collected by the mentor). The public page can include the user's comments on the web feeds. Standard features also include tagging and rating feeds or posts. Posts can typically be browsed by feed, by date, or you could see an aggregated feed of all the feeds you subscribe.
Support also exists for feed collections. Topical feed collections allow users to gather feeds about a specific topic, and later view all posts of all feeds. Topical feed collections are typically of a community and the whole community gathers feeds into the collection.
An aim of the present invention is to address the problem of covering a field of interest by a group of users. A further aim is to collaborate on the filtering of feeds by a group of users.